Ultrasound medical devices are becoming more common. A typical ultrasound device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,772,412 dated Mar. 3, 1998 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,471,651 dated Oct. 29, 2002 which patent is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
A typical implementation of an ultrasound medical device has the transducer portion separate from the main processing unit of the device. Traditionally, the analog and digital signal processing of the raw ultrasound signals to/from a patient are performed in a main processing unit. The raw ultrasound signals are passed to/from the scanhead transducer across a cable to the main processing unit. The cable that connects the ultrasound transducer with the main body of the ultrasound processing unit must be fairly long because the processing unit is not easily moveable and the scanhead must be placed on the anatomy of interest in a variety of positions. The cable is also typically large and heavy because it carries the transmit and receive signals for a number of individual elements of the transducers, located in the transducer head. The length, usually in excess of six feet, coupled with the weight of the cable places significant stress and strain on a sonographer. The cable also adds significant cost and complexity to the system.
Another problem with existing cables is that they typically contain a large number of individual coaxial conductors that are expensive and difficult to connect to a single connector. A connector is often required on the cable since multiple tranducers are used on the system for different applications. The connector, due to the large number of interconnect lines and the sensitive nature of the signals, is therefore large, complicated and expensive. Thus, the overall cable is expensive, troublesome to assemble and repair as well as difficult to use.
The aforementioned large number of individual conductors results from the desire to individually excite the elements of the transducer arrays with electronic wave forms so as to generate mechanical movement of the transducer elements in a controlled fashion and thereby create ultrasound energy which is then transmitted to the patient's body in a desired direction. That is, ultrasound transmit beams may be formed to focus ultrasonic energy at a particular point or region in space and ultrasound receive beams may be formed to collect data along one or more lines or directions to derive information regarding particular structures of interest, such as to form images thereof. The ultrasonic energy is reflected from internal organs (and other items of interest), coming back to the transducer elements where it is converted back to electrical signals for subsequent processing by the processing unit. The signal between the transducer and the processor unit should pass these signals, without significant distortion, attenuation or interference, up and down the connecting cable.